Confessions of a GP - Benjamin Daniels [74]
Ed
Medics’ humour can be fairly brutal and one of our favourite games was stitching up our mates. Ed was a friend from medical school but when the rest of us qualified, he failed his exams and the poor bugger had to retake. Six months later, he did qualify and came and joined us as a hospital doctor. Ed was taking over my job on the ward and was extremely nervous about his first day. As I left on my last evening, I had the ward in fairly good shape ready for Ed to take over in the morning. However, we thought it might be entertaining to fish out a few embarrassing photos of Ed from medical school. Using the ward computer, we put a particularly unflattering photo of Ed on a notice. It stated: ‘THIS MAN CLAIMS TO BE A DOCTOR CALLED DR EDWARD BENNETT. HE IS A CONMAN. PLEASE REPORT HIM TO SECURITY IF SEEN ON THE PREMISES.’ We put the notices up on the ward that he was due to start on the next morning and then left for our new placements at different hospitals. Poor old Ed spent his entire first morning having to try to prove that he was really a doctor and eventually had to ask the dean of the medical school to confirm his identity.
Poor Ed was eventually allowed to start work and he survived his first year as a doctor. His next job was as a casualty doctor and, unfortunately, his first day was equally disastrous. We have a system where, at the beginning of August, we all swap jobs overnight. Often a doctor will be on call in one hospital one evening and then start work in a hospital in a different part of the country the next day. This is what happened to Ed. After finishing a shift at midnight, he woke up at 4 a.m. to drive 100 miles to a new hospital to start work in A&E. Ed didn’t know the area and was driving around town lost, trying to find the hospital. Unfortunately, the combination of being sleep-deprived and lost resulted in him crashing his car on a roundabout. He wasn’t badly hurt but the paramedics wanted to play things safe and he was wheeled into the A&E department where he had been due to start work, strapped to a spinal board and wearing a neck brace.
Being ill as a doctor is always a difficult experience, especially if you end up being admitted to the hospital in which you work. During my first year as a doctor, I was admitted for an operation on my ankle. It was very odd being on the other side and quite an eye-opener. My friends, of course, saw it as an excellent opportunity to stitch me up. They managed to find my drug card and thought that it would be hilarious to write me up for all sorts of unnecessary medications that would mostly have to be inserted up my backside. Still dopey from the anaesthetic, I had to fend off a particularly enthusiastic Filipino nurse who was determined to carry out all the doctors’ carefully written instructions.
Camouflage man
Camouflage man is frightening when you first meet him. He has a big bushy beard and wears head-to-toe army camouflage gear, complete with balaclava and army cap. He is homeless and carries all his belongings in a large holdall on his back that he secures to his body with a long chain that is wrapped around him several times and locked with a big padlock. Camouflage man has paranoid delusions that he is being followed and people are trying to attack him and steal from him. These thoughts are partly because of his mental illness and partly because life on the street is tough and he regularly gets beaten up and robbed. You would probably cross the road if you saw camouflage man walking towards you, but now that I know him I realise that he is much more afraid of you than you are of him. His real name is Nigel.
Nigel is mentally ill but because he doesn’t fit nicely into one neat category of mental illness, no one has really taken responsibility for him. Nigel has